Lansbury wows London critics at 88 | SBS News 20 Mar 2014 - 10:50am Lansbury wows London critics at 88 Dame Angela Lansbury, who has returned to the London stage at the age of 88, has received rave reviews for her acting in Noel Coward's play Blithe Spirit. Source: 0 Angela Lansbury has British critics spellbound with her performance as a dotty mystic in Blithe Spirit on the London stage. The 88-year-old performer is appearing in the West End for the first time in almost 40 years as medium Madame Arcati in Noel Coward's supernatural farce. She won a Tony for the role on Broadway in 2009. The Daily Telegraph's Charles Spencer praised Lansbury's "astonishing energy and comic panache" in the production, which is directed by 85-year-old Michael Blakemore. In The Times on Wednesday, Dominic Maxwell said Lansbury's "amazing precision and vim" were "a master-class in character comedy".

Lansbury, who was born in London, is known worldwide as small-town sleuth Jessica Fletcher in the long-running television series Murder, She Wrote. She said after Tuesday's opening night that "being back in London felt very natural and terrific". Lansbury, who was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2014 New Year Honours, toured Australia in 2013 in the play Driving Miss Daisy. Angela Lansbury wows critics in London stage return - YouTube Angela Lansbury wows critics in London stage return Want to watch this again later? Sign in to add this video to a playlist. Need to report the video? Sign in to report inappropriate content. Rating is available when the video has been rented. This feature is not available right now. Please try again later. Published on Mar 20, 2014 Angela Lansbury has British critics spellbound with her performance as a dotty mystic in "Blithe Spirit" on the London stage. The 88-year-old actress is appearing in the West End for the first time in almost 40 years as medium Madame Arcati in Noel Coward's supernatural farce.

She won a Tony for the role on Broadway in 2009. The Daily Telegraph's Charles Spencer praised Lansbury's "astonishing energy and comic panache" in the production, directed by 85-year-old Michael Blakemore. In Wednesday's Times of London, Dominic Maxwell said Lansbury's "amazing precision and vim" were "a master-class in character comedy." London-born Lansbury is known worldwide as small-town sleuth Jessica Fletcher on long-running TV series "Murder, She Wrote." Category Angela Lansbury "Very Proud" To Be Made A Dame | Contactmusic.com Angela Lansbury "Very Proud" To Be Made A Dame Angela Lansbury "Very Proud" To Be Made A Dame Angela Lansbury Queen Elizabeth II Judi Dench Maggie Smith The actress received a special honour from the Queen today. Angela Lansbury has today been bestowed with the honour of being made a dame by Queen Elizabeth in a special ceremony. The 88 year-old actress, who had previously been known as Angela Lansbury CBE, will now be known as a Dames Commander of the Order of the British Empire after having received the very special honour at Windsor Castle in recognition of her accomplishments and contributions.

Angela Lansbury Was Today Made A Dame At A Windsor Castle Ceremony. Dame Angela was joined by her son, his wife and her niece as she collected the award for her services to drama as well as charitable work and philanthropy. "It is a very proud day for me to be recognised by the country of my birth, and to meet the Queen under these circumstances is a rare and lovely occasion," she commented, via Sky News . The thrice Oscar-nominated movie star was presented with an honorary Oscar last year for her long and illustrious career in film but she said that being made a dame was a very different recognition. "One [the Oscar] is for my work in motion pictures and this is for the overall accomplishments of my life as an actress," she said. Such exciting news for Angela Lansbury! pic.twitter.com/zBsvwlPMNh — HELLO! (@hellomag) April 15, 2014 "It has afforded me the joy of working in America and also in England a great deal," Dame Angela added.

Best known for her role in the TV series Murder, She Wrote as crime writer and sleuth Jessica Fletcher, Angela has appeared in countless film including Bedknobs And Broomsticks, The Manchurian Candidate and alongside Elvis Presley in Blue Hawaii. The London-born, US-raised star now joins a select group of acting Dames, including Judi Dench , Maggie Smith and Penelope Keith. At the same ceremony today, Veteran entertainer Nicholas Parsons was also honoured with a CBE for his lifelong work for children's charities and Sculptor Antony Gormley received a knighthood from the Queen. The 'Murder, She Wrote' Star Was Humbled By Her Honour, Describing "A Very Proud Day." "I think Britain has a relationship with sculpture as a kind of art that carries the collective imagination in a way that perhaps painting doesn't," the latter said. "I take the award in the name of sculpture because I think of it as being an art form that is of and for the public." Angela Lansbury can currently be seen appearing in Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit at London's West End Gielgud Theatre.

Angela Lansbury 'sparkling' in Blithe Spirit - BBC News BBC News Angela Lansbury 'sparkling' in Blithe Spirit 19 March 2014 Close share panel Image copyright johan persson Angela Lansbury's return to the West End stage in Blithe Spirit has been lavished with praise by the critics. The 88-year-old actress, who plays eccentric medium Madame Arcati, drew a massive round of applause when she arrived on stage on Tuesday's opening night at the Gielgud Theatre. It is Dame Angela's first appearance on the London stage for nearly 40 years. In his five star review of Noel Coward's comedy, Charles Spencer said Dame Angela was "on sparkling form". "Thirty-five years ago I remember being bowled over by Lansbury's performance as Mrs Lovett in Sondheim's Sweeney Todd on Broadway. She brings a similar energy and high definition wit to Madame Arcati," he wrote. "Her voice swoops and soars with superb grandeur and her extraordinary dance routine, in which she seems physically to vibrate as she goes into a trance, is a wonder to behold." Perfect...

(she) makes it look effortless Quentin Letts, Daily Mail He concluded: "This is a tour de force that will glow warmly in the memory of all who see it." The Independent's Paul Taylor said: "With her red Princess Leia-style coiffure and clashing arty-meets-hearty wardrobe, Lansbury's Madame A is a quivering, deliciously erratic blend of bohemian lady novelist and girl guide." His four star review continued: "It's the way, though, that she emphasises the medium's batty and strangely admirable self-belief that makes her portrayal so funny and endearing." Reviews also noted strong performances from other members of the cast, including Charles Edwards, Simon Jones, Janie Dee and Jemima Rooper, who plays Elvira, the ghost. In The Guardian, Michael Billington thought that Dame Angela's presence had "a faintly distorting effect". But he noted that it was "Lansbury the audience has come to see and she gives good value". 'Amazing precision' "When going into a trance, Lansbury careers around the stage like a bird about to take wing.

And she emits little gurgles of delight when the ghostly Elvira blows draughts of air into her face. "Even if Lansbury's voice seems on a different level from that of her colleagues, it is a perfectly credible performance." He said the real star of the show, however, was Charles Edwards, as the novelist haunted by his late wife. The Daily Mail gave the play five stars, describing Dame Angela's performance as "perfect... makes it look effortless". Quentin Letts concluded: "Even without Dame Angela, and despite the steep ticket prices, this would be a top-class show. With her, it is a West End event." The Times [subscription required] gave the play a decidedly average three stars, although it reserved its criticism for the play itself, describing it as being "fun" in parts but "with plenty of padding, too". Dominic Maxwell said Dame Angela "gave a masterclass in character comedy...

if I remain less than dotty about the play, Lansbury's amazing precision and vim made me delighted to have seen it again." Dame Angela Lansbury shows Blithe Spirit - WhatsOnStage.com Send Email Dame Angela Lansbury shows Blithe Spirit After an absence of 40 years, Angela Lansbury 'returns in triumph' to the West End to reprise her 2009 Broadway portrayal of Madame Arcati WhatsOnStage ★★★★ ... Angela Lansbury returns in triumph to the West End in the same role, again directed by Michael Blakemore... I can't recall a jollier geriatric evening – the show is notably well cast in the "youngster" department, too, with Charles Edwards as the smug novelist Charles Condomine and Janie Dee and Jemima Rooper as his two wives... There's something weird, beautiful and disturbing about this Arcati... the way she acts an eyeful of muttering I've only seen done as well by Alastair Sim or Michael Hordern ... the comedy is enriched with still more ambiguity and confusion...

Simon Higlett's spacious design of the Kentish wooden-beamed living room, and Mark Jonathan's lighting, deliver the right ghostly goods throughout, and in the scenic calamity at the end as Charles strikes out from all the women in his life, free at last (possibly)... Charles Spencer Daily Telegraph ★★★★★ ... Blakemore's direction has exactly the right lightness of touch while also capturing the bracing heartlessness of this deliciously dark divertissement... Lansbury brings astonishing energy and comic panache to her performance. It is a comedy that still startles and delights... Yet it is also a comedy that makes you shiver... The great thing about Blakemore's production is that it so deftly mixes the wit and the underlying coldness of the piece... This is a tour de force that will glow warmly in the memory of all who see it. But the whole show is a treat and Blakemore's production, elegantly designed by Simon Higlett with spookily billowing curtains, splendidly captures the bracing heartlessness of the comedy... the whole production has an assured style and wit about it that the Master himself would surely have applauded.

Michael Billington Guardian ★★★★ ...it is Lansbury the audience has come to see and she gives good value. She follows a basic rule of acting by playing Madame Arcati from the character's point of view: not as a fake medium but as someone who takes her trade seriously... Edwards is one of the best comic actors on the British stage and, here, he charts perfectly the hero's zig-zag emotions... The comedy is reinforced by the excellent Janie Dee, who lends Ruth an air of steely ferocity, while Jemima Rooper 's Elvira is an unusually tactile and seductive spook. But it's the sculpted dialogue that gives most pleasure and it's a sign of Coward's theatricality that a simple line such as Ruth's statement about Elvira... can still raise the roof. For me the play's the thing rather than the return of a popular star. Paul Taylor Independent ★★★★ ... The 88-year old Murder, She Wrote star, theatrical legend, and newly appointed Dame of the British Empire may not have trodden the boards in London for 40 years but the public has firmly (and understandably) decided to accord her the status of National Treasure.

Her every exit and entrance in Michael Blakemore's wittily assured production is greeted with a warm round... Highly skilled comic actresses... have come to grief in this role by overdoing the oddball qualities... Lansbury's Madame A is a quivering, deliciously erratic blend of bohemian lady novelist and girl guide... Charles Edwards beautifully captures the supercilious suavity of the novelist... this is a cold-blooded, arguably misogynistic comedy. But it's warmed by the presence of Lansbury who, at the standing ovation, looked to be a very happy medium. Daily Mail ★★★★★ Dame Angela Lansbury was born in 1925... That makes her 88, not so rare an age these days but still unusual for someone taking a leading role in an expensive West End show... Does she convince as this dotty old cabbage? Of course. She is perfect. Makes it look effortless... Dame Angela's first return to the London stage for 40 years provokes applause at her entrances and exits... A man in the stalls whooped her for completing her first scene. Had he expected her to keel over mid-line?

Instead of patronising her for making it to 88, let us hail her vocal projection... This play, which in recent years has sometimes been overvamped, holds up well when played in a properly blithe spirit... Even without Dame Angela, and despite the steep ticket prices, this would be a top-class show. With her, it is a West End event. Henry Hitchings Evening Standard ★★★★ Angela Lansbury's return to the West End, after an absence of nearly 40 years, is something to treasure. Vocally deft and possessing a natural grandeur, she delights in the juicy role of eccentric medium Madame Arcati... Whenever she's onstage there is a happy mix of substance and scene-stealing: she captures the character's self-importance but also her frivolity... Jemima Rooper is impeccably irritating as Elvira, the most seductive of ghosts... When the coldness of the central relationships is apparent, the humour hits its mark. True, the first twenty minutes are underpowered and there's a lull in the second half. Yet while this certainly isn't Coward's best play, Michael Blakemore 's production is nimble.

Inevitably it's Lansbury who is the big draw, vivacious in defiance of her age. Her fans will be entranced by the charm, balance and precision she brings to such a well-known role. Angela Lansbury interview: aged 88 and still blowing our socks off - Telegraph Follow This interview was first published in 2014. It is being republished today to mark Angela Lansbury's 90th birthday It’s quite rare to meet a legend. But there can be no doubt that the gracious, grey-haired woman sitting quietly in a London hotel deserves the epithet. Angela Lansbury has been huge in films, feted on the stage and adored on television. She started acting at 13; at 88, she is about to star as Madame Arcati in the West End in a revival of Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit. The holder of a record-equalling five Tony awards and an honorary Oscar, she was made a Dame in the New Year’s Honours (“well, that was a shocker – I feel enormously honoured”). So “legendary” is the only word that comes anywhere close to describing her.

Yet when I apply it, she responds with a laugh and a brisk: “Goodness, gracious.” That is, as I discover, a very Lansbury-like expression. Her years in the United States have left her with an unmistakable voice, a deep, swooping, precise English, with just a hint of the transatlantic – and a fondness for old-fashioned expressions such as “noggin” and “my oh my”. Related Articles Jemima Rooper: Why have I stopped being cast as a lesbian? 10 Sep 2014 She might have stepped straight out of Bedknobs and Broomsticks, just one of the films that have lodged her so indelibly in the popular imagination. Yet Lansbury possesses a warmth and humour that the witchy Miss Price sadly lacked and, smartly dressed in scarf, cardigan and trousers, she still has the animation of a woman 20 years her junior. “I’ve never been particularly aware of my age,” she says, putting heavy emphasis on the final word. “It’s like being on a bicycle – I just put my foot down and keep going.

I never look at my face and think 'God, you’re getting old’ or think of running out of steam.” Her vitality is, she confesses, the result of tremendous self-discipline. “I lead a very regimented life. I take excruciating care of myself: I take a lot of vitamins, get enough sleep, don’t drink apart from a glass of wine occasionally. I have to watch food otherwise I blow up like a balloon. I am boringly good, you know.” It’s taken five years for her lauded performance as Madame Arcati , the dotty medium whose conjuring of a wife from the dead wreaks havoc with a newly married widower's life, to make it from Broadway, where it won her a fifth Tony award. Ben Brantley, critic of the New York Times, remarked in his review that it was hard to imagine “any Broadway chorus line topping the solo dances performed by a woman with... the gait of a gazelle and a repertory of poses that bring to mind Egyptian hieroglyphs.” Lansbury laughs again when I remind her of his description of these “little neo-Nijinsky dances”. “Oooh I am going to have to work on that,” she says.

“It wasn’t really a dance so much as a sort of ritual. It just came to me as I was rehearsing and I hope to God I can replicate it. I don’t happen to be as nimble as I was back then, but I’ll do my best.” Praised: Angela Lansbury on Broadway in Blithe Spirit (Picture: Robert J. Saferstein/AP) She is also relearning her lines before going into rehearsal with a London cast that includes Charles Edwards and Janie Dee, admitting that this is the most difficult part of being an older actor. We talk a little about her friend James Earl Jones, with whom she performed Driving Miss Daisy in Australia last year. Even then he was trying to learn the lines for his performance as Benedick in the Old Vic’s Much Ado About Nothing – a feat which, by press night, still eluded him. “That doesn’t surprise me,” says Lansbury, sympathetically. “It’s not easy when you are of a certain age. But we struggle along and cover it up, if we need to.” Even with a heavy cold, Lansbury gives no hint of anything except the sharpest intellect and an unswerving honesty.

Names occasionally elude her, but whether looking back over her astonishing career or discussing the events of the day, she has an acuity and a curiosity which you suspect have sustained her over her career. Her last performance in the West End was in Hamlet in 1975, in Peter Hall’s production opposite Albert Finney’s Prince. “I was a very stony-faced Gertrude,” she says. “The men all looked like paratroopers and I looked like a stubby, tubby lady. I was a bit tubby because I got so bored in all the scenes I had off I ate sweets and sewed. So I got very fat!” Lansbury was born in East London in 1925, and her father died when she was nine. Inspired by the movies she saw – “sometimes I’d go to the cinema on the way home from school” – Lansbury began to imagine following her mother’s career as an actress. She trained in London at the Webber Douglas School and then, when the family moved to America in the war, in New York. “I was just a kid really, a kid,” she says, with considerable emphasis.

“Those of us who were 12 or 13 when the war started were absolutely thrown into the mainstream. We had to grow up instantly, and take care of ourselves.” She was working in a shop in Hollywood, where she had no particular entrée to the movie industry, when she got a phone call from a friend saying that MGM was looking for English girls to play the maid in Gaslight; she not only got the part, but also her first Oscar nomination. She was 17 years old, with a heart-shaped face, beautiful expressive eyes, and a great talent. But the seven subsequent years she served as an MGM contract player mainly wasted her abilities. “They didn’t know what to do with me,” says Lansbury, without rancour. “They didn’t make the sort of movies that I could possibly have shone in, so they used me as a utility. I played a lot of older women.” As an example of her under-use, she explains how she tried to persuade the studio to let her play Lady de Winter in The Three Musketeers, with Gene Kelly and “a wonderful cast of good-looking young men.

I remember going in and making a really strong pitch because I knew damned well I could bring it off – my goodness, she was a horrific sort of woman, actually – but no, they put Lana Turner, who was the great glamour girl of all time in the part and I ended up playing the Queen of France.” This wasn’t because she was unattractive. “They got me up marvellously.” But the studio would not back her. “I had the ability but I didn’t have the name. They could have built me, which is what they did with Deborah Kerr, but I don’t think I was quite hot enough in the looks department, quite frankly. I was all talent and no looks.” Surveying today’s landscape, Lansbury believes that in some ways things have changed for the better. “I don’t think the glamour girl is necessarily the actress who makes it. I think movies are far more interesting and there is a certain type of girl who is quite strong – like Cate Blanchett, who is very individual and a striking-looking woman.” But she notes, wryly, that particularly in television, conformity generally rules. “What I notice about the women is that they tend all to look alike.

One of the reasons is they all have the same teeth. Have you ever noticed that? Nobody has interesting teeth. And I’ve always thought that people’s teeth were part of their look and part of the thing that makes them different from the next girl. This is why some of the French stars are so much more interesting-looking because they are tiny, or dark, or they have physical attributes that are individual and different. Whereas our girls all seem to have long hair, lanky frames and the same teeth.” She giggles at this, but is gently thoughtful as she analyses the cause. “There are a lot of women producers now but very few women directors and it is men who are looking for the kind of looks they deem to be attractive.” Her mood is serious, too, when she talks about the difficulty of combining a career with a family; she speaks from complex experience. After a brief first marriage to a man who turned out to be gay, Lansbury married the actor and agent Peter Shaw, with whom she spent 54 years. Despite their happiness – and her bleak sense of loss after his death in 2003, after two years in which she put her career on hold to be with him – they suffered many vicissitudes.

Their home in Malibu burnt down in 1971, more or less at the same time that she discovered that both their son and their daughter were seriously addicted to drugs. They retreated to Ireland, where Lansbury had family ties, and helped the children to sort themselves out. “We were so shocked because during that era there was nowhere to go, nobody to consult, no way to help them.” Did she ever feel that she had not been able to spend enough time with her children when they were growing up, I ask. “Oh gosh yes,” she replies. “I say to myself now what I missed, always having to have nannies, you know. Big mistake. You have got to be with your children, you must enthuse them with your values, your feelings. “I use the excuse that we were Eisenhower people. In those days all women who could afford it had somebody to help take care of their children, and if they were professional women even more so. Those tiny babies should have had me, but I was working. No sooner I’d had the babies than I went on the diet to lose the weight and I was back in business.

I do regret that.” Today, she muses, “some women are terrific, they just bring their kids to the set.” Lansbury discusses all of this without a hint of self-pity. She is warm but matter-of-fact and unsentimental; partly, one suspects, because she has given so many interviews that virtually everything you can think to ask her has been discussed before. Yet there is so much to talk about. At each point in her career when an obstacle arose, she triumphed in a different sphere. “Someone always came along with a suggestion and unless I had a good reason to say no, I generally said yes.” So it was that after another Oscar nomination for The Manchurian Candidate in 1963, she put her film career on the back burner and found a new lease of life in musicals, partly thanks to the Stephen Sondheim, who cast her out of the blue as the lead in Anyone Can Whistle in 1964. It closed after nine performances. “It was a complete failure, boom, out,” explains Lansbury, smiling. But it led to a part in Jerry Herman’s Mame (1966), which brought her her first Tony.

Sondheim remained a friend and “a very dear part of my career” and it is another Tony-award winning performance, as the opportunistic pie-maker Mrs Lovett in Sweeney Todd, that remains her favourite role. “I loved it. I loved playing it for almost two years, but after that, I decided to take a rest because it really took a lot of out of me and that’s when I went into TV, which I had previously avoided like the plague. It was a conscious decision because TV was a form of annuity for actors.” Popular: Lansbury in an episode of Murder She Wrote (Picture: Rex) Lansbury knows that many of those who arrive at the Gielgud Theatre to see Blithe Spirit will be there because they loved Murder She Wrote, the TV series in which she starred as the mystery writer and amateur detective Jessica Fletcher for 12 years and 264 episodes. That’s fine with her. “Give me a body and I’ll go to work,” she jokes, as she tries to explain its enormous appeal. “I loved Jessica’s reasonableness, her liberal qualities, her everywoman qualities.

I think that is what made her so acceptable to an across-the-board audience and I tried to maintain that always. She never took an attitude; she simply listened, came to her own conclusions, and used her noggin.” Despite or perhaps because of her affection for the series, she is glad that plans for a remake starring Octavia Spencer have been called off, not least “because it didn’t seem fair to her and she is a very good actress”. Lansbury’s conversation is peppered with recollections of other people’s work – all of them kind. She talks at one point about Peter Ustinov, who was once married to her older sister, and who was a “wonderful influence” in her formative years. “We would sit in the back garden and talk in different languages or accents or whatever, and it was part of my beginning to pick up different characters.” She talks too about Bette Davis, whose performances in films like Dark Victory marked her earliest cinema-going memories. They finally worked together in Death on the Nile – and forged a bond. “She was always on set, absolutely ready to go, smack on at nine o’clock and so was I, because we were part of the old Hollywood crowd.

And she said: 'You know, Angela, you and I are the only professionals in this company.’ ” Lansbury laughs at the recollection. “Of course that’s not true. Goodness gracious what a cast that was. That was one of my favourite parts, by the way.” With Madame Arcati to come, you have the sense that the cast of Blithe Spirit will become part of her repertory of generous anecdote and rich memory. For Lansbury isn’t just a Dame, or one of the last of the Hollywood stars. She’s a legend. Blithe Spirit begins previews at the Gielgud Theatre on March 1.

Tickets: 0844 482 5130 or from Telegraph Box Office: 0844 871 2118 or boxoffice.telegraph.co.uk Dame Angela Lansbury on Murder She Wrote, losing her husband and conquering the West End | Life | Life & Style | Daily Express PUBLISHED: 00:08, Sun, Mar 2, 2014 Dame Angela Lansbury is set to conquer the West End [GETTY] You’d know the face in an instant, even 18 years on. It’s Jessica Fletcher, doyenne of detectives and still catching killers on cable TV. The voice, though, is quite a surprise: it’s as English as Miss Marple nibbling a muffin. But then Dame Angela Lansbury is a Londoner – an East Ender in fact – born in the capital 88 years ago. “I run a real British household, let me tell you,” confides this star of stage and screen, as she prepares to grace the West End for the first time in four decades.

“I drink very strong tea and I still buy tins of sardines.” The tissue up the sleeve of her elegant navy dress is certainly more Bethnal Green than Beverly Hills, but it’s 74 years since Angela Lansbury called this country home. These days she divides her time between houses in New York and Ireland, where she has roots on her mother’s side. “There’s Scottish blood in there too,” she says, “so I’m a mixture.” Now appearing as medium Madame Arcati in Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit, she has the energy of a woman half her age. “I take a lot of vitamins,” she explains. “I also think it’s down to my constitution. My grandfather came from the East End and he was built like an iron man – he had an amazing constitution – and I think I inherited it from him. I had a lot of admiration for his ability to keep going.” Angela Lansbury has certainly inherited that. And to show for her 70-year career she has not only her damehood – conferred in the New Year’s honours list – but an honorary career Academy Award, three Oscar nominations and five Tony Awards from her various outings on Broadway.

The last of those came in 2009 for the role she is now reprising at London’s Gielgud Theatre. “It feels like coming home,” she says, surveying the very auditorium where her mother, actress Moyna MacGill, made her debut in 1918. “I already feel welcome and it’s an extraordinary experience to be in the theatre where my mother first appeared.” It was through her mother that Angela found herself bound for the US, when Moyna organised the evacuation of a party of British children in 1940 (her father, left-wing politician Edgar Lansbury, had died when Angela was nine). Almost as soon as her feet touched American soil, Angela’s acting career began. Angela Lansbury is meeting the Queen during the Dramatic Arts reception at Buckingham Palace [GETTY] “I’ve come back from time to time, but you’re probably too young to know what the hell I’ve been in,” she laughs. “I did several plays with the Royal Shakespeare Company. No, not several plays – one play, and I can’t remember who with. Age has a way of taking names straight out of your head.

Anyway, I have been back but not for 40 years.” Angela’s last visit came in 1975 when she played Gertrude in the National Theatre’s Hamlet. “I can’t believe it’s been so long,” she sighs. “It doesn’t seem that way to me. Life has been marvellous. I’ve had an extraordinary, interesting and varied career that’s taken me all over the world, and I’ve performed with some of the great actors of my generation.” Her first professional appearance came at the age of 17 when she was cast in the 1944 Hollywood thriller Gaslight. “That was an enormous break,” Angela recalls, “which was followed by two other lovely films: National Velvet with the great Elizabeth Taylor and The Picture of Dorian Gray. Unfortunately, they were followed by a string of the most awful films ever.” She’s referring to her 10-year, 13-film stint as a contract player for MGM, at the mercy of studio mogul Louis B Mayer. Angela has never published her memoirs but, hearing stories of her adventures in 1940s Hollywood, you wish she would.

“I visited Mayer in his office on a number of occasions, and that was quite an experience because you had to go down this long corridor which was rather intimidating, to say the least. And you had to go cap in hand, as I often did, saying, ‘Please Mr Mayer, don’t make me play the queen of France.’ He’d say, ‘Yes dear, but I personally think this is a great role for you,’ so I’d be sent back to the wardrobe department and I’d end up playing the queen of France [in 1948’s The Three Musketeers] when I’d rather have been playing Lady de Winter, which was a far more interesting part. But that went to Lana Turner, who was the great glamourpuss at that time. I just had to mind my own business and get on with it.” 13th August 1949: Angela Lansbury and her husband, Peter Shaw, at their wedding [GETTY] Juggling marriage and children and problems with drugs.

But all those things contribute to building the person you become and the person they become Dame Angela Lansbury Then there was the time she drove herself to Mayer’s house for dinner with Lord Lascelles, cousin of our own Queen Elizabeth. “We had cocktails, lots of glasses of wine, brandy, champagne – in those days everybody drank – and then I drove myself home. I thought to myself afterwards, ‘Good God, what a risk for a woman of 18 to take, driving herself home after all that.’” Angela looks on her MGM years with little fondness. “They didn’t know what to do with me and I really wasted about eight years there,” she says. “That’s the reason I went back to the theatre, which is what I’d been trained to do as a youngster.

Once I got my feet in the door of legitimate theatre, I realised that was where I felt most comfortable – so I said goodbye to the movies, went to Broadway and became a musical comedy actress.” Angela’s stage hits included the musicals Mame (she played the title role) and Sweeney Todd, though she also found time for film work in The Manchurian Candidate, Disney fantasy Bedknobs and Broomsticks and Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile. And then there’s the redoubtable Mrs Fletcher of Murder, She Wrote who solved her first case in 1984 and continued tripping over bodies for the next 12 years. That’s a chunk of her career about which Angela has no regrets. “A great portion of the youngsters who came to see Blithe Spirit in New York did so because they’d seen me as Jessica,” she says. “It was a bit of shocker, I’m sure, seeing me playing someone so different, but they seemed to enjoy it.” The stage is clearly her true love and she has a long list of credits. “But I’m not going to go on and on about all that,” she says, waving a dismissive hand.

So conversation turns instead to her personal life, which is hardly less eventful. Eloping at 19, she married actor Richard Cromwell, who was 16 years her senior. They divorced after a year and, in 1949, she wed another actor, Peter Shaw. Their marriage of 54 years – until Shaw’s death in 2003 – was a solid one, but not without trials after their two children, Anthony and Deidre, both got into drugs in the 1960s. “It was a juggling act,” Angela says. “Juggling marriage and children and problems with drugs. But all those things contribute to building the person you become and the person they become. It’s a simply question of facing up to certain aspects of family life that have to be dealt with.” Full-time motherhood was never an option. “It was no good me giving up working – that wasn’t going to solve anything,” she says. “I was unable to help my kids so I pulled them out of where they were and put them in a safe place.

That was the most I could do at the time, because we didn’t have the help back then, the places where youngsters could go that they have today.” County Cork proved a safe haven. Angela has kept a home there since 1970 and says, “It’s as if I’m rediscovering my roots. On the street people say, ‘Hi, how are you?’ and I say, ‘Grand, how are you?’ It’s a very easy place to live and I love Ireland for that reason.” Now entering her eighth decade in the spotlight, Dame Angela insists that she has never been ambitious. “I just did what was handed to me but the things that were handed to me were quite extraordinary,” she says. And she has no plans to slow down. “I have an inordinate amount of energy and I’ve got to expend it somehow. I always say there are two things in life that I know how to do – one is to keep house and the other one is to act.” She laughs again. “And acting usually takes precedence, so the place is a bit messy at times.” Angela is delighted with her latest venture, with its “marvellous cast” and the opportunity of revisiting Madame Arcati.

“I think this is one of the best parts I’ve ever had in the theatre. If you’re that happy in a role you want to repeat it, and what better place to repeat it but in London – the place of its origins and mine.” Blithe Spirit is in preview at the Gielgud Theatre in London now and opens on March 18. Call 0844 482 5130 or visit blithespiritlondon.com . Related articles Angela Lansbury set to return to London stage after four decade absence | The Independent Angela Lansbury set to return to London stage after four decade absence The actress will return to the Gielgud Theatre where she made her debut Thursday 23 January 2014 17:25 BST Click to follow The Independent Culture Angela Lansbury is set return to the London stage after a hiatus of almost four decades Getty Images Angela Lansbury is set return to the London stage after a hiatus of almost four decades, to the theatre where her mother made her theatre debut.

The Murder She Wrote star called it an “extraordinary experience” to perform in the Gielgud Theatre in London, where her mother Moyna MacGill first performed almost a century ago. The 88-year-old will play Madame Arcati in Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit. She called the role, which won her a Tony award after its Broadway run, “one of the best parts I’ve had in the theatre”. The last time the actress, who was made a dame in the New Year Honours, performed on stage in the UK was as Gertrude in Hamlet at the National Theatre in 1975. “I can’t believe it’s been 40 years, it doesn’t seem that way.” Lansbury was born in Poplar, east London, but was evacuated to America during the Second World War at the age of 14. “It feels like coming home,” she said at the theatre yesterday, adding that even in the US: “I run a real English household. I still have the cans of sardines.” One complaint, surprisingly, was the tea.

“I drink very strong tea, but you can’t find it in London,” she said, putting out a request for the Irish brand of Barry’s Gold Blend Tea. Lansbury is widely known for her role as Jessica Fletcher in long-running television show Murder She Wrote. She said a large number of people coming to see her in Blithe Spirit since 2009 were “unquestionably” there because they had seen her on the television. “Those that came seemed to enjoy it.” Her debut came in the 1944 Gaslight, which was an “enormous break,” followed by National Velvet, and The Picture of Dorian Gray. “They were followed, unfortunately by a string of the most awful films,” she said. “I was an unknown quantity so they cast me in anything.” Following that she returned to the theatre before appearing in films such as Bedknobs and Broomsticks and The Mirror Crack’d. She said of all the people living or dead she would “love to have a cup of tea” with actress Ellen Terry. “She was incredible. She was a homebody and would cook the dinner before going to the theatre. That’s my cup of tea.” More about:

Question: Which 88 year old Dame is currently appearing in Blithe Spirit in London?
Answer: ANGELA LANSBURY